Masterpiece: 'Italian Painters of the Renaissance' (1930) by Bernard Berenson

The Indispensable Eye

By

Joseph Epstein

Dec. 14, 2012 7:42 p.m. ET

The art historian and connoisseur Bernard Berenson was a figure whose life was a novel but by no known author. Born in Lithuania in 1865, he emigrated at the age of 10 with his parents to Boston. He went to the Boston Latin School, thence to Harvard. He married the sister of the belletrist Logan Pearsall Smith and became the brother-in-law of Bertrand Russell. After establishing himself as an expert in Renaissance art, he set up as a leading authenticator of Italian painting. The home and subsequently museum of Isabella Stewart Gardner in Boston is filled with paintings acquired for her by Berenson.

Claiming a 5% commission on all the paintings he authenticated, Berenson became rich. Not all his authentications were uncontroversial—some plainly weren't accurate—and his connection with the art dealer and operator nonpareil Joseph Duveen tainted his reputation. Before long he moved into a magnificent villa outside Florence known as I Tatti—today, at his bequest, the Harvard Center for Renaissance Studies.

Berenson became an intellectual celebrity, at an exalted, cosmopolitan level. I Tatti's guestbook would read like an Almanach de Gotha of 20th-century intellectual life: Isaiah Berlin, Hugh Trevor-Roper, Kenneth Clark were regular visitors. Along the way Berenson published two volumes of his journals and, among other books, "Aesthetics and History," "A Sketch for a Self Portrait" and a little masterpiece called "Italian Painters of the Renaissance."

ENLARGE

Christopher Serra

"Italian Painters of the Renaissance" first entered the world as four separate essays published between 1894 and 1907. Authoritative, magisterial, written with unrelentingly confident cadence, it was brought out as a book in 1930. (In its 1952 Phaidon Press edition it contains 400 illustrations.) Much more than a survey, the book makes firm critical judgments, sets out lines of influence, and everywhere provides subtle elucidations. In "Italian Painters of the Renaissance," Berenson set out the true lineaments of Renaissance art history, and laid the foundation for the future study of Renaissance art, both for scholars and the educated public.

Berenson's masterpiece also establishes an aesthetic theory, which its author brilliantly illustrates by examining the triumphs and failures of the Italian painters of Venice, Florence and Central and Northern Italy from the 13th through the 17th centuries. The theory is that form, movement and space-composition are the three main qualities that make for great visual art. (Color is touched on only glancingly in the book.)

By form, Berenson means the painter's power to supply a third dimension to his art by lending "tactile values to retinal impressions," so that "the picture shall have at least as much power as the object represented." In the work of great painters such as Giotto, the figures painted will convey "an even keener sense of reality, of life-likeness than the objects themselves." A tactile imagination is for Berenson the first requisite of the great painter.

As for movement, in painting it makes us "realize [life] as we never can actually, [and] gives us a heightened sense of capacity." The painter accomplishes this "by so rendering one particular movement that we shall be able to realize all other movements that the same figure may make." All paintings are done in the present tense; a master of movement allows one to imagine it as well in the past and future tense.

Space-composition is for Berenson the ability to paint so that the viewer gains a "sense of space not as a void…but as something very positive and definite, able to confirm our consciousness of being, to heighten our feeling of vitality." Superior space-composition, he holds, is as close as painting gets to evoking the emotions that music does. Skillfully done, it is for the viewer "as if a load had just been lifted from one's breast; how refreshed, how noble, how potent one feels again, how soothed; and still again, how wafted forth to abodes of far away bliss."

For Berenson art is about feeling: "not what man knows but what he feels concerns art. All else is science." Art must be "life-enhancing." Aperçus about the function and power of art appear throughout "Italian Painters." "For there is no more curious truth than the trite statement that nature imitates art. Art teaches us not only what to see but what to be." He writes: "So invincible is the task of learning to see for oneself, that all except a few men of genius—with a gift for seeing—have to be taught how to see."

These men of genius are the great artists. The best of them, for Berenson, are Giotto, Michelangelo, Raphael and Leonardo, with Botticelli, Masaccio and Perugino not far behind. Giotto was the first, after the artists of antiquity, to understand the power of form. Michelangelo appears in Berenson's pages with a trumpet-sounding prose accompaniment: "At last appeared the man who was the pupil of nobody, the heir of everybody, who felt profoundly and powerfully what to his precursors had been vague instinct, who saw and expressed the meaning of it all."

The only greater tribute Berenson pays in "The Painters of the Italian Renaissance" is to Leonardo, whom he considered—and who could disagree?— a universal genius. "Nothing that he touched but turned into a thing of eternal beauty." Even contemplation of Leonardo's personality, Berenson thought, is "life enhancing as that of scarcely any other man."

Berenson cites Raphael as the greatest master of space-composition. His portraits, he finds, are unsurpassed in "rendering body and soul." In his short life, Raphael created "a world where the bird of morning never ceased to sing." His paintings Hellenized Hebrew biblical subjects. In him "all that was noblest and best…in classical culture found at last its artist." Berenson adores the sublimity of Raphael.

"Italian Painters of the Renaissance" ends on a dark note. Berenson writes that since the Renaissance Italy has produced thousands of "clever and even delightful painters, [but] she has failed to produce a single great artist." How he would have reacted to our contemporary art scene, dominated as it is by obscurantist critical theory and a relaxed relativism of standards, is not difficult to predict. Apropos of the Veronese painter Domenico Brusascorci, he wrote: "Newness is a very minor consideration in the world of art…[where] it is intrinsic quality only that counts." For Berenson mediocrity was unredeemable, and the mediocre when encouraged "to seek for originality…are only capable of anarchy."

How splendid it would be to have another masterpiece like "Italian Painters of the Renaissance" to clear away the confused underbrush of contemporary visual art and establish the qualities required for serious art in our day.

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